Saturday, March 6, 2010

Oh Joy! Moral Police!

There's something highly appealing about an institution dictating morality and culture to you. It just satisfies me to know that there's a higher force dictating right and wrong to me. Thank God for the security on campus too! Those guards in Khaki are the best, they yell and threaten you for all the 'wrong' things you do like hugging members of the opposite sex, wearing t-shirts as opposed to an Indian print top of the same length, talking in clusters and the latest, listening to your iPod.

I think that my campus is one of the only ones in which every single employee of the institution takes complete and utter liberty to belt you for whatever you do. If you need a piece of paper stamped form then, they never do it without pretending you've asked them for an arm, leg, their genitals and their babies before they actually stamp the damn thing. Therefore, a 3 second process takes 7 minutes in lectures, 4 minutes in making you shuffle between different offices, 6 minutes in verification and another 12 wasted in argument. Bureaucracy in all it's glory.

The dress code policing is almost as hilarious as the mingling-with-members-of-the-opposite-sex policing. A couple of friends of mine [a boy and a girl] were walking down slightly later and the boy put his hand on her shoulder, like a Genie rising out of the very same action, a moustachioed guard appears and uses his voice of authority to say "Yeh Lalbagh hain kya?" ["is this a garden?"].

The 'Office of Exams' is by far, the best. It's so interesting that all the clerks there make you feel so terrible about doing badly just because they have access to your scores. They are sarcastic, mean and condescending. Took me a while to figure out that they must not have done too well in their exams to have landed up stamping and filing at my university. But who gives? They take the liberty to tell you that you suck and you're not gonna succeed and such like. What?

I feel loved!